IRS official says House will get all emails

Jun. 23, 2014
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Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen talks to reporters during a break in his appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee hearing on their continuing probe of whether tea party groups were improperly targeted for increased scrutiny by the IRS, Friday on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS asserts it can't produce emails from seven officials connected to the tea party investigation because of computer crashes, including the emails from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the investigation who has invoked her Fifth Amendment right at least nine times to avoid answering lawmakers' questions. / J. Scott Applewhite, AP

by Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

by Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON - Congress will receive all of the e-mails associated with an IRS investigation into whether conservative groups were looked at more closely when they filed for tax-exempt status, Commissioner John Koskinen told a House panel Monday.

E-mails from the former director of the Exempt Organizations office, Lois Lerner, should be delivered in "unredacted form" by the end of the month, Koskinen said in a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"As soon as possible thereafter, we will complete redaction of those e-mails and produce them to this Committee," Koskinen said. "At that time, this Committee will have all of the e-mails - 43,000 of them - that we have from Lerner's computer and e-mail account for the period January 2009 through May 2013. In addition, this Committee will have 24,000 Lerner e-mails from other custodians' accounts, for a total of 67,000 Lerner e-mails."

The committee chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., played a video at the beginning of the hearing showing almost all the Republican members of the committee asking for "all of Lois Lerner's e-mails."

Koskinen answered at a previous hearing that he would provide them.

"You worked to cover up the fact that there were missing e-mails and came forward to fess up only on Friday afternoon," Issa said, adding that Koskinen did not find the e-mails until the committee learned of new e-mails. "I subpoenaed you here tonight because frankly I'm sick of your games."

"We have now obtained contemporaneous evidence from 2011 showing the exact opposite, that it was a technological problem," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in response to Issa's statement. Koskinen was able to show exactly what had happened with the e-mails, Cummings said. "The fact is there are long-standing problems with technological records in government agencies."

He pointed back to "millions" of Bush administration e-mails that had been lost.

Koskinen told reporters the IRS had turned over more than 8,000 hard-cover pages to Issa's committee.

"We've given them all the pages they asked for and now they're talking about bringing in all the IT people," he said.

The request for Lerner's e-mails comes in response accusations that the IRS targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

Koskinen seemed ruffled by the idea that the IRS was not helping the committee as fully as it should.

"This committee has received over 600,000 pages of materials redacted to protect taxpayer information," he said. "The tax-writing committees have received over 835,000 pages of unredacted materials."

He also tried to explain why there have been difficulties in the first place, reporting that as many as 2,000 IRS employees had hard-drive crashes since the beginning of this year because IRS computer equipment is dated.

In fact, IRS IT funding has decreased by $100 million since fiscal year 2010. Koskinen told reporters the problem the IRS has is the size of the server, because it's too small to hold all the e-mails. He said it would cost at least $10 million two years ago to update, it but decided they did not have the money.

Lerner's computer crash happened in 2011, before the congressional investigations began, he wrote, and she complained about it and asked for assistance.

"I checked with the technician, and he still has your drive," an IT front-line manager wrote to Lerner on July 20, 2011. "He wanted to exhaust all avenues to recover the data before sending it to the 'hard drive cemetery.'"

The manager later wrote her that the hard drive had been sent to the IRS's Criminal Investigation Division forensic lab, "as a last resort," to try to recover the data.

"Unfortunately the news is not good," the manager wrote in August 2011. "The sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable."

Still, Koskinen said the committee should receive all that they are looking for.

"The question is what e-mails outside the agency prior to April 11, 2011 are not in the 24,000 Lois Lerner e-mails sent to other IRS employees during that period," Koskinen said in written testimony. "Last week, I understand the White House and the Department of Treasury stated they were providing all of their Lois Lerner e-mails, which should help fill those gaps and answer that question."

Monday's hearing follows a Friday hearing where Koskinen refused to apologize for losing the e-mails.

White House Counsel Neil Eggleston wrote a letter in response to a subpoena from Issa for Jennifer O'Connor, the former counselor to former acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, to testify about what she knew about Lerner's e-mails. Eggleston states that the committee should have what it need.